


Almanah

by leiascully



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Death, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Legal Drama, The X-Files Revival, Wakes & Funerals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-08
Updated: 2015-11-08
Packaged: 2018-04-30 13:47:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5166068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>We regret to inform you of the sudden death of Fox Mulder… </i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Almanah

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: XF Revival  
> A/N: From a pair of intensely sad tumblr prompts. Kisses to aloysiavirgata for the title.  
> Disclaimer: _The X-Files_ and all related characters are the property of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, and Fox Studios. No profit is made from this work and no infringement is intended.

They come to her door like she’s a war widow. Two men in dark suits, too much hair to be military, but their tailoring is uniform anyway. She almost doesn’t answer their knock. She knows what they’ll say, suddenly and absolutely, as certain as if they held a telegram. _We regret to inform you of the sudden death of Fox Mulder…_

She makes her face into a mask and opens the door.

“Doctor Dana Scully?” one of them says.

She nods. 

“Fox Mulder named you executor in his will,” the other one says. 

“Come in,” she says, and seats them at her table, and offers them coffee. They accept and sit sipping gingerly. She sits too, and spreads her hands flat on the table, as if she’s bracing herself. 

“Mister Mulder died last night,” one of them says. She didn’t ask their names. She doesn’t really want to know. One is black and the other looks Hispanic; they seem kind enough, their manners polished and professional, just like their suits. They push their cards across the table at her. She reads their names numbly, automatically. Eric DuBois, J.D. and Carlos Jimenez, J.D. She imagines their pride the day they first appended those initials to their names. She felt the same when she became a BA, an MD, an agent of the FBI. 

DuBois clears his throat and she looks up from the rectangles of heavy cardstock with their expensive engraving. “There was an accident,” he says gently.

“I didn’t know,” she said. She isn’t sure her heart is beating. Even her lips are cold. Maybe Mulder’s death took the warmth from the universe; she’ll descend into a slow hypothermia without him. 

“Had you spoken to Mister Mulder recently?” Jimenez asks.

“No,” she says, and it’s so strange to say it. No, she hasn’t talked to Mulder in weeks, and the years they used to fret if they went hours without speaking seem like some kind of dream. It’s been a year since she packed her bag and left. Like Orpheus, she could never help looking back. Like Eurydice, he seemed confined to hell. 

“Were you aware that he named you the sole heir to his estate?” Jimenez continues.

“When we were married…” she begins, and falters. “Yes, I was aware.”

“It may take some time for the property to be dispersed to you,” DuBois tells her, but she’s shaking her head.

“I don’t want it,” she says. 

“How you dispose of the property is up to you,” DuBois says. 

“I want to see him,” she tells them.

Jimenez shrugs. “That’s up to the hospital. Or the morgue, I should say.”

She’s standing up from the table. “Which hospital?”

“George Washington,” Jimenez tells her. 

“He was an organ donor,” she says. Her brain is full of static; the world is blurring at the edges. She still feels cold. Her tongue is heavy in her mouth. 

“The hospital knew that,” DuBois assures her. His bedside manner is much better than Jimenez’s. She wonders if this is good lawyer, bad lawyer, one to turn up the heat and the other to soothe the burn. “His wishes were respected.”

“Was there any indication of foul play?” she asks, her voice starting to grate in her throat.

The lawyers look at each other. “We aren’t qualified to speak to that,” DuBois says.

“I need to go to the hospital,” she says. 

“We can take you,” Jimenez tells her. 

She shakes her head. “Thank you. I can drive myself.”

“Doctor Scully, it’s our firm’s policy to provide transportation in these cases,” Jimenez says, and she’s certain he’s lying, because she can’t imagine that’s been codified into their practices. She also knows that navigating the streets of DC is beyond her capability at the moment. Her hands are trembling. She puts on her coat and lets them bundle her into the car. Her coat is black. The car is black. She rides in the back, sinking into the cushioned seat. Perhaps this is the only funeral procession he will have. He wanted to be cremated, after science has had its fill of him. They talked about it one night on the road, ice cubes rattling in two tumblers of bourbon and their various oddities spread out on the table between them: her junk DNA, his agile mind, the miracles their bodies have wrought. They are strange, unnatural specimens, keepers of the keys to arcane mysteries. They left themselves to science. She will have everything of him except his bones, until they cremate him. His ashes will be hers. _Scatter them under the stars_ , he’d said. 

Who will have his eyes? Who will have his heart, his liver, his kidneys? Was there any part of him worth salvaging? Was there any part of him still human enough to take hold in someone else’s body? She wonders the same about herself.

DuBois and Jimenez murmur to each other, but do not speak to her. She is already a ghost, her reflection transparent in the window. The world moves through her and she feels nothing.

Everyone looks to her at the wake. Someone she doesn't recognizes asks if she'll say a few words when she scatters his ashes. She doesn't know where these people came from or who invited them or why they are asking her questions. What is there to say? She can’t conceive of any language that could have the words to contain all the things they never spoke of. She scatters his ashes in silence, in the field behind the unremarkable house where, for a little while, they found some measure of peace. She remembers the pads of her fingertips touching his cheekbone. He was cold, his skin flaccid, too long gone for any hope of recovery. If they had told her immediately, if she had seen him before they had salvaged what they could from the wreck of his body - but that was too much to hope, and she knows better. 

Her life is the only rejoinder, the way she carries on the only possible response to his years of challenges and parries. She goes on living, and the things she would say weigh her down and bear her up all at once, the way William did in her womb. She has lost them, but she is not lost. 

She gives most of his things to charity, sells the houses, invests the rest. He would want her to be comfortable. She doesn’t care about comfort, but Mulder never let go of the impossible dream of finding their son. She changes her will to leave the money to him, her miracle child, wherever he is, knowing that the most likely outcome is that the money will rest in perpetuity in its virtual vault, quietly turning itself into more money under the watchful eye of Mulder’s people. 

She was one of his people once. Now she is only herself.


End file.
